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ATI/AMD's Open-Source Plans

Phoronix: ATI/AMD's Open-Source Plans

Starting off the X.Org talks at FOSDEM 2008 was AMD's John Bridgman, who has been leading the AMD GPG open-source efforts. John had talked briefly about the history of their open-source efforts for the R500+ series and the evolution of AMD GPU hardware. Among the interesting comments made were that TexturedVideo/X-Video support for the R500/600 may be coming quite soon, DRM and Mesa work forthcoming, open-source multi-GPU CrossFire support is on the road-map, and they will be re-releasing R200 programming documents. The RV620 and RV635 documentation is expected in the near future.

I'm kind of curious. What will be the benefit of releasing the bottom-end of the fglrx driver?

In theory it could then just be dropped into DRM... but with the work required to go through all the code for release, by the time that's done, there will probably already be the support written by the Radeon/RadeonHD guys.

While its nice that ATI/AMD have released so much so far, I'd rather they just follow through and support what they already said they'd do, then try to open source other less important things (like part of fglrx) and divert resources away from the key project of getting full hardware support on Linux and open documentation so that other OSes can also benefit.

Basically, I'd like to see everything on this page fixed:http://megahurts.dk/rune/r300_status.html
Hyper Z implemented on r200 (the original documentation lacked this), FSAA on all cards, etc. Followed by trying to achieve feature and performance parity to windows on all cards.

Personally while I think its nice to know CrossFire is on the roadmap, it should be for the far, far future. First, getting an Open Source single GPU driver is needed. Also, I'm very surprised by the number of linux owners with 3870 X2s. Most people who buy these type of cards are gamers who are on Windows. The WINE devs specifically mention that ATI/AMD cards don't work well with WINE. Getting a good single GPU driver and possibly even working with them should be a prelude before any serious Linux multiGPU work.

I want to stress that "Crossfire Graphics" itself is not on the open source roadmap. What I we were talking about here was that the informaion we were providing for 3D should be sufficient if someone wanted to write a low-level compute driver for their GPU (a number of people have asked), and I added, somewhat in jest, that it might be a good thing to do with that second GPU on a 3870X2.

Sundown, one of the reasons we discussed open sourcing the bottom end of the fglrx OpenGL driver at the start of the project was that it might serve as a good example for developers trying to use all the different features of the chip. Having said that, during the R5xx 3D work we started to come to the conclusion that the right documentation could be more useful.

Basically, I'd like to see everything on this page fixed:http://megahurts.dk/rune/r300_status.html
Hyper Z implemented on r200 (the original documentation lacked this), FSAA on all cards, etc. Followed by trying to achieve feature and performance parity to windows on all cards.

We have hyper-z on r200 already, it was reverse engineered a few years ago, a lot of things on Rune's page are out of date and have been fixed or are in the process of being fixed. Some things are in the process of being fixed and some things are corner cases.

The thing is now the docs are available fixing some of these things should be a lot easier for anyone with development skills.

Okay, thanks for the clarification about CrossFire. The main jist of my previous post was that focus should be kept on making a stable base before thinking about adding the latest and greatest features.

As far as r300 status I know that its getting better all the time. I've watched the recent flurry of commits and am very happy about that.

However, I know that the ARB2 stuff doesn't work on r300 (even a fairly recent MESA build), due to GLSL issues (I believe). I also think the fog extensions still have issue. I know this since one game I want to play uses these features and doesn't display correctly. Rune's page is a little old, but as it was still linked via the DRI r300 page's wiki, and I had the above issues, I thought it was still somewhat accurate. Maybe someone with administrative access might want to remove the link? Also, some visual ids aren't supported and if they are, have a Slow caveat. Ideally this would all be fixed.

As far as Hyper Z on r200, there was a thread around here about r200 not being feature complete on Linux. I couldn't find it, but this post shows that the r200 might have some work left: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=743&num=1 I guess I was just under the impression that everything that wasn't in the specs. hadn't been implemented. I guess some things have.

Anyway... I'm really grateful for the document drops or all the hard work that's going into these drivers. I just want to see them feature complete. I also don't want the older cards to overlooked in all the excitement. That's all.